


What You Keep Hidden

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [42]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Affection, Avenger Loki (Marvel), Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Hiding, Reader-Insert, Secret Relationship, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24050047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: You love him, even if you do have to work to keep your teammates from finding out.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 13
Kudos: 257





	What You Keep Hidden

It wasn't that you necessarily wanted to keep him a secret. In fact, you kind of hated that you couldn't be as open as you wanted. You were never really one for PDA, but it felt dishonest, both to your friends and to your relationship, not to be more open about the whole thing.

Loki and you had kind of just...fallen together. There weren’t any big world-stopping moments, no huge gestures or nerve-wracking confessions. There was just the two of you, coming together like it was the most normal thing in the world. He could be sullen and prickly and hard to please, but that had won your heart. With a lot of the others, he’d slink out of the room as soon as they appeared, but he stuck around with you. It was his prickliness that won your heart, to be honest. He was a little like the feral cats you looked after when you were younger: sharp and wary, but won over easily enough with time and patience. 

The rest of the team wasn’t completely oblivious. They saw that you were close. Wanda was fond of pointing out just how tolerant Loki was of most of the things you said and did. Clint was still wary of Loki, which made sense even if he didn’t have the sceptre anymore, but you sometimes caught him watching the two of you with a thoughtful look on his face. Thor just seemed happy that Loki had someone else on his side. 

The two of you had talked it over a lot, especially at night when you could stretch out in his arms, run your fingers through his hair without worrying about anyone seeing. Neither of you particularly wanted to deal with whatever Tony could come up with: the snarky quips or downright snippiness. Already you were tired of the wary looks that Nat sent your way any time you sat too close to Loki in the living room, and you couldn’t imagine that they would get any better if she found out how close you actually were. 

You’d teased Loki, once, about what Thor would do if he ever found out about the two of you. When he was with Jane, you knew that Loki had been incredibly...skeptical, if not downright disdainful. You’d brought that up one night, with the light from the full moon streaming in through the windows, and joked about how Loki probably wanted to avoid his brother ever finding out that he was with a _mortal_. But Loki had gone stiff beneath you, and then reached out to hold your face firmly in his hands, and promised you— _swore_ to you—that he was not ashamed to be with you. His eyes had burned with sincerity, and when he brushed his thumbs across your cheekbones, you’d even gone a bit dizzy. It had been all you could do to simply nod your head and wet your lips.

It wasn’t easy. You had always been a fairly tactile-based person. You liked touching people: throwing your arms around their shoulders or their waist while you walked together, grabbing their hand in the middle of an intense story, play-fighting, hand-holding, hugging. But even you knew that you needed to reel it in when you were with Loki in the common areas of the Tower. Slowly, he started coming to more and more “family time,” as Tony called it, and it didn’t feel weird or unexpected for you to sit next to him on a couch or to wedge yourself into a chair with him during a movie. You liked that. A lot. In the dark, he would slide his arm around your shoulder, would press gentle kisses to your temple. Maybe you both liked that little thrill of danger, that risk of exposure, but no one said a word.

You’d slipped once, late at night after watching a movie with the rest of the team. Everyone had gotten to their feet to stretch and try to wake up their bodies after sitting for so long, and, half-asleep, you had pressed yourself to Loki’s back, wrapping your arms around his waist and hiding your face in his shoulder blades. You’d heard him laugh quietly and then felt him reach down to cover your hand with his, but then he’d tensed up as he remembered the others in the room.

You didn’t have to be fully-conscious to know that they were looking at you a little differently.

For as long as you’d been circling each other, it certainly wasn’t out of the norm for you to keep spending time together. You read together a lot, usually sitting together on the couch in the sitting room. Even before there’d been anything to hide, it hadn’t been unusual for one of the others to walk in on the two of you. That held steady. Sometimes you sat a little bit closer to him than you really needed to. Sometimes you let your thigh press against his. The contact was reassuring, a reminder that he was solid and he was there. You could only assume that he felt the same: sometimes when you shifted and stopped touching him, he’d reach out and, half-distracted by his book, let his hand rest on your knee. 

At dinner, if the whole team was eating together, he typically sat across from you. That had been his seat before you’d given in to your feelings for each other, and you knew that trying to rearrange things now would only bring more suspicion upon you. So you couldn’t sit next to him, but you managed just fine. When you were feeling particularly brave, you would reach out with your feet and touch his. It could have been dangerous, except there was something like an electric field around him. You always knew when he was nearby, because your skin prickled like it wanted to be against his. Maybe it was all in your head, but it also kept you from playing footsie with Thor, so...there was that. You would nudge Loki’s foot gently with your own, and he would always give you that look, that ghostly smile that hovered around his lips even as his eyes burned with desire for you.

You stole moments together in the hallways: hungry kisses and tender caresses after you both looked around to be sure that no one was looking. Loki would let his touch linger on the small of your back if he passed you while near any of the others, and you would have to fight not to arch into his touch. You always made sure to pay him back for that when you were back in the privacy of one of your rooms, dragging your nails down his back or along his thighs. 

At first, you were hardly ever sent on missions together. Your skill sets were just too different, maybe, or maybe Fury wanted to make sure that Thor was never far from Loki, just in case. But when you did work together, it was seamless. You had never known anyone with whom words were so pointless. You could understand each other perfectly using nothing more than facial expressions while cornered in an enemy hideout. When you needed him to be somewhere, he was always right there. When he needed to pass something to you, or when you needed him to serve as a distraction, it happened practically without communication. You were like two halves of the same being, working in tandem. Thor noticed it, and maybe he said something to Fury, because you started working together more often.

After a mission, you took care of each other as wordlessly as when you were working. He’d help you out of your suit; you’d do the same. Neither of you much cared for stopping in at the infirmary, and instead you’d patch each other up sitting on the side of his bed. Then you’d shower, each of you running your hands carefully along the other’s body to clean without aggravating any wounds, and dry, and dress. It was hard to remember what things were like before you fell together. 

At night, when it was just the two of you tucked safely behind a closed door, Loki always touched you like he was making up for lost time. His hands would trace your body, take you in, like he was trying to memorize the feel of you. You did the same. You loved how his eyes would slip closed when you played with his hair, how his lips would part when you tugged gently on it. He loved the goosebumps that would erupt in the wake of his touch and always grinned wickedly at you when he made you shiver. You loved his hand on your mouth, his teeth in your shoulder, when you were trying to keep yourselves quiet in the middle of things even though the sheer intensity made you want to scream until the Tower crumbled.

Sometimes your brain betrayed you. Despite the way his eyes had burned at you when he made that promise to you, on occasion those little doubts would creep in. It was easy to have such an intense love when you were only ever behind closed doors, after all. If you were the only one who knew how he touched you, if you were the only one who could see the hunger in his eyes, was there a point? You always did your best to tamp that back down: the touching and the hunger _were_ the points. The soft words of love murmured against your temple, your throat, your shoulder, they were the points. But when Wanda reached for Vision’s hand at the dinner table, or when he made her giggle during “family time”, you always felt a little...cold. You couldn’t look at Loki at times like that, because you knew he’d see too much in your face. And this wasn’t his fault. You both agreed at the very start that you didn’t want the others to know. And didn’t Loki do his very best to make it up to you when you were alone at night? So you swallowed that strange feeling in your throat and made yourself smile. A little bit of angst every now and then was an extremely fair price to pay for the way Loki looked at you. 

It was strange to have “family time” without everyone there, but it had become something of a weekly tradition and Thor and Loki had been sent on a mission at the last-minute. You’d kind of wanted to sit this one out, maybe hide in your room, but you had steeled yourself and gone downstairs at the last minute. You ended up sharing the couch with Wanda and Vision, even laughing at some of the things they said. These people were your friends. They _were_ your family. You pushed away that childish selfishness and let yourself smile at how happy Wanda was. She deserved that, didn’t she?

The footsteps came about halfway through the movie. You’d recognize Thor’s heavy gait anywhere, and though you couldn’t quite hear Loki’s, you knew he was nearby because you could feel him. Thor didn’t come into the room. You heard his steps carrying him away: maybe to his own quarters or to the infirmary. But Loki hovered in the doorway. Even in the dark, you could see the blood. He was covered in it. His hair hung in strings around his face, matted with filth and gore. You couldn’t hold back your gasp, or the way you rose shakily to your feet. Was he paler than usual? Was he unsteady? You couldn’t tell. You went to him and touched his face. He closed his eyes and leaned into your touch.

“What happened? Are you okay?” It was hard to control your voice, which came out in a ragged half-whisper. Loki was strong, but this was a _lot_ of blood. Your stomach turned.

“I’m fine. None of this is mine.” He reached up to cover one of your hands with his. That seemed to snap you back into yourself, back into remembering that there were other people in the room and that they could see you. He pulled your hand off of his cheek, and you thought maybe he was going to push you away, but he only brought it to his lips to press a kiss to your palm. His eyes seemed shadowed, like he’d seen too much tonight. He raised his other hand to the back of your neck and pulled you in closer so he could slant his lips across yours.

You thought to pull away, but you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. Instead, you melted against him and kissed him back, hard, fingers scrabbling against his bodysuit for whatever handhold they could find. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against yours and just looked at you. Your cheeks were burning. The entire team had seen that, you knew, and yet no one had said a word. You searched Loki’s face for any signs of realization, of regret, but he was only gazing at you like he’d thought he’d never see you again. 

Clint was the first to speak, finally. You heard him draw in a breath and let it out slowly and braced yourself for sharp words, but he only laughed. “Is anyone else not surprised?”


End file.
